To Make is To Care
To Make is To Care
On 'The Puppets are Alright' by The Finger Players, The Makers Lab 2022/2023 (Singapore)
The Finger Player’s Makers Lab is back with a triple-bill of performances titled The Puppets are Alright.
Featuring three makers, Marilyn Ang, Loo An Ni and Sim Xin Feng, The Puppets are Alright is a result of their research into puppets and ideas of tactility, sustainability and flexibility respectively.
Besides the three works—My Father the AI Machine, Parting and The Bench—The Puppets are Alright also showcases the Makers’ processes toying with materials like sand, bubble solution and simple animatronics. It is plenty of fun for puppet-lovers, and the three works place the puppets front-and-centre of the excitement.
My Father the AI Machine is set in a Singapore of the near future. The government has created the “Revive the Dead Programme” (RDP), where humans are able to transfer their brainwaves and memories into a robot after dying. Boy (Neo Hai Bin) and his Ma (Doreen Toh), live with the robotic version of his long-dead Pa, portrayed by a puppet by maker Sim Xin Feng. Despite struggling to make ends meet, Ma pours all her wages into trying to buy upgrades for the robot, much to Boy’s chagrin.
The puppet of Pa has glowing eyes that move with a joystick controller and some other unexpected tricks. Despite this, it remains very much just a puppet, but to great effect.
Between Boy’s violent rejection of it as his father and Ma’s unceasing love for it, the unfaltering gaze of the sitting puppet is enough to elicit a strong sense of discomfort and sadness.
In one scene, Ma cradles Pa’s small body and dances intimately with him. Their waltz is heartbreaking: Pa is small like a child, but brittle like an old skeleton; at the same time, he is stiff like an object and yet gazed upon so fondly by Ma that he comes alive. It’s pitiable to watch and makes one wonder, is this truly a worthwhile existence for either of them?
My Father the AI Machine is a solid piece of drama with a suffocating sense of pathos and moments of sardonic humour. But above all, it is a reminder to cherish the time we have together.
In contrast, Parting takes the notion of corporeality and runs in a wildly different, even horrifying direction.
Written and directed by Oliver Chong and spotlighting maker Loo An Ni’s work, Parting is a non-verbal performance in which Alvin Chiam plays a troubled man haunted by his personal demons after committing a foul act. He is visited by a female puppet and the spiral deepens.
The man’s psyche is revealed through three “things” dressed and masked in black, (played by Angelina Chandra, Jo Kwek and Rachel Nip). As they slink and scuttle across tables and sinks, an air of whimsy follows; a trio of half-formed child-like beings I cannot put a finger on. Their chittering and cackles echo with an oppressive radio static, and twitchy repetitive moments are punctuated with sudden stops and stillness. This dance with Serene Tan (stan)’s soundscape is constricted, deliciously suspenseful and anxiety-inducing.
Then comes the full-sized female puppet. A mannequin come-alive, she is dressed in a bra and granny panties and piloted by the three “things”. At first, I was not too charmed by the bulky and effortful ensemble of three people manipulating one hefty puppet. Eventually, as the man and puppet-woman embrace in one last trying dance to Skeeter Davis’ sorrowful End of the World, the difference between them—both in form and fate—makes for a striking picture.
The Bench, written by Ellison Tan and directed by Myra Loke, is about the strained relationship between a father (played by T. Sasitharan) and his son, Paul.
Paul has unresolved issues about his mother’s demise and Dad has never forthcoming with him—not because he doesn’t want to, but because he doesn’t know how to. Instead, Dad often doles out wisdoms from the greats like Aristophanes, Homer, Twain and Gandhi, hiding behind these meandering tales and verses.
Raised on this, Paul never gets to know his father’s true self. He feels his world is a bubble: beautiful on the surface, but fragile, insubstantial and about to pop at any moment.
The Bench is a joy for all object-lovers: the puppet Paul is humanoid, with a bulbous head with a cloudy design reminiscent of the globe or an iridescent bubble, and fitted with a bubble-blowing mechanism. There is also the titular Playtronica bench, which warbles notes when touched by the copper tape sewn to Paul’s hands.
Even whiny little baby Paul is a wonder to watch, especially as he is puppeteered and voiced by a very grown Ian Tan, who does so with unassuming delicacy.
There are many competing halves of The Bench: one full of words and another full of touch; one sagely and rooted, the other with his head in the clouds; one of truth and the other of rhetoric. They swirl and they never really come to rest, leaving us with an open-ended contemplativeness…
For me, The Puppets are Alright is a journey of discovery for the audience as much as it must have been for the makers. Each puppet is an intoxicating mix of material explorations and tactile affinities. And, though they come alive by the hands of puppeteers and the creative team, they are also a force of audiences' collective imaginations and actualisations. This communal effect of watching puppets and its co-creation is perhaps the most gratifying thing about championing puppetry for a new generation.
As technology brings us new fangled sophistications in artificial intelligence and virtual personas—a sort of digital puppetry, if you will—it is easy to relegate the craft of puppet-making to a forgotten corner in favour of more seamless hyper-realism.
But in a time where tactile experiences are being replaced with screen time, and crafting is replaced with mass-production, The Makers Lab assures that to make is to care—for our selves, for each other and for our world.
If this precious live act of co-creation and the art of magical, material manifestations can be shared, then not just the puppets, but we too, will be alright.